That Letter of the Disciples of Scientism

Dr. David Colquhoun writes about me and that UCL debate in his rather sneering blog in which he accuses anyone using alternative medicine of lying to their patients. This is a blatant and untrue insult which he arrives at via an illogical and irrational cascade of argument. Suffice to say that I've yet to meet a doctor using homeopathy who does not believe his or her homeopathic prescriptions have an effect independent of the placebo effect. Prof. Colquhoun might not think that homeopathic remedies have a physiological effect but homeopathic doctors using them certainly do. Anyway this is what he has to say about the UCL debate and myself:

Dr Brian Kaplan was there. He had given the meeting some publicity, in a web posting that also kindly gave publicity to our 2006 letter to the Times. He didn’t like the letter, which is unsurprising given that it turned out to be more effective than we could ever have hoped.

For once I agree with everything Prof. Colquhoun says here.

I was at the meeting and was happy to give it advance publicity.

I was also more than happy to give publicity to the letter that Colquhoun et al, a group of doctors and scientists, I have called Physicians of the Utmost Fame (apologies to Hilaire Belloc) wrote to NHS Directors of Commissioning. More than anything else, this letter was a slap in the face for Britain’s 40 000 GPs as it sought to go above their heads and thwart any of them that would like to send a patient for NHS homeopathic treatment.

Colquhoun is also right in saying that I did not like the letter. Here are my reasons:

It was inappropriately and highly misleadingly written on paper that had an NHS letterhead. This is what the Department of Health thinks of that:

A document entitled “Homoeopathic Services” which was distributed to Directors of Commissioning earlier this year has caused some confusion because it carried the NHS logo.
We would like to clarify that this document was not issued with the knowledge or approval of the Department of Health and that the use of the National Health Service logo was inappropriate in this instance.
The document does not represent any central policy on the commissioning of homoeopathy and PCTs continue to be responsible for making the decisions on what services or treatments to commission to meet their community’s health needs.

But of course this ‘correction’ was almost invisible after chief executives of 476 NHS Trusts had read this highly personal and opinionated viewpoint of the The Disciples of Scientism – on NHS paper! So yes I do agree it was effective. Expedient, opportunistic, misleadingly written on NHS paper, patronising and condescending to GPs – but effective, yes. And thus I must conclude that Prof. Colquhoun thinks that the end justifies the means. There are two possible reasons for this:

1. The people of the UK are too stupid or too uneducated to choose the sort of doctors they want and must be forced to have only medicine approved of by the Disciples of Scientism.

2. The General Practitioners of Britain cannot be trusted not to refer patients for ‘implausible’ forms of medicine such as homeopathy. This is my main point and has been for some time. Homeopathy is not and never was available on demand to the British public. You had to get your GP to refer you to an NHS clinic to get homeopathic medicine. Thus an honourable course of action by the Physicians of the Utmost Fame would have been to write their letter to a journal widely read by GPs such as the British Medical Journal. But GPs might have not appreciated the condescending and patronising tone of the letter and reserved the right to choose to refer to whatever NHS clinics they liked. Knowing this, the professors chose to go over the heads of GPs and write a letter (totally inappropriately on NHS paper) to chief executives of 476 NHS Trusts with the power to thwart GPs who wanted to send patients for NHS homeopathy!

Do I like that? No, Prof. Coquohoun I don’t. Bullying Britain’s GPs, leaving the utterly spurious impression that conventional medicine is based on solid evidence while homeopathy isn’t, writing to non-medical bureaucrats utterly inappropriately on NHS paper thus giving the false impression that your pompous letter was somehow an NHS document (a ‘technicality’ that would have your entire case for a reform in NHS policy unceremoniously thrown out in a British court of law), is definitely not to my taste. Perhaps I should wake up, abandon conscience, read The Prince, and fully understand that the end always justifies the means.

Professor David Coquhoun, I’m happy to debate this with you. Feel free to be assisted by the jeering journalist, Simon Singh or preferably the medically trained journalist, Ben Goldacre. Bring along the man who also nastily accused homeopaths of ‘lying’ to their patients, Prof. Edzard Ernst. I tried to defend honour in traditional British manner by challenging him to a duel – but alas no reply. Whatever happened to chivalry? In fact bring any of your fellow Physicians of the Utmost Fame or any of the other 13 Disciples of Scientism who co-signed that letter. Your case is so weak it has been transferred to the Intensive Care Unit.

Anywhere, any time, on any media, in front of any audience. I’m ready…

That Debate at UCL

This House would no longer make homeopathic treatment available on the NHS:

For: 65
Against: 53
In abstention: 37
The motion was therefore carried.


You can see Prof. Colquhoun's comments and hopefully my reply on the UCL debate website.

No count (as is done by Intelligence Squared debates) was taken before the debate but clearly most people had come with their minds made up.

Peter Fisher gave a good account of homeopathy and he and his colleague easily won the rational debate.

Prof. Colquhoun made the astonishing claim to the effect that the great majority of orthodox interventions ARE in the sector of evidence based medicine. Astonishing because he offered NO PROOF and NO EVIDENCE for this. Clearly the same rules do not apply to homeopathic doctors and Professors of orthodox medicine! I would love to debate this with him.

The jeering journalist, Simon Singh, had much to say. Memorable was his referring to homeopathy as a 'spherical bastard' by which he means that which ever way you look at it, it's a 'bastard'. Obviously he does not care to look at it from the point of view of the over 90% of patients who visit the Royal London Hospital being very satisfied with the service. (Note added on 25/11/2008: Simon Singh has been in contact with me since the debate and has made it very clear that although he did talk about 'spherical bastards' in his allotted time during the debate, this was before he actually began to speak about homeopathy and that consquently I misunderstood what was simply him quoting a joke by the astrophysicist, Fritz Zwicky. He has made it clear that it was not his intention in any way for anyone to think that he was referring to homeopathy as an example of a 'spherical bastard') He also cited his vile 'study' showing that homeopaths supported giving homeopathic prevention for malaria. 'Ten out of ten homeopaths' phoned apparently were happy to do so. I KNOW this is false (and I wrote about this at the time) because I was phoned up and made it clear in no uncertain terms that people should take orthodox malaria preventative medicine and anyone advising any alternative is giving criminally negligent advice.

But overall I expected no better from Singh and Colquhoun. My great disappointment was with the students. They missed the point of the debate which was not whether homeopathy is plausible or 'scientific'. It was about whether it should be allowed on the NHS - an issue of civil liberty in many ways. The point that Colquhoun and his cronies sought to go over the heads of GPs to prevent rather than dissuade (which would have been at least an honourable course of action) by writing to PCTs asking them to disallow GP referrals to homeopathy in their areas was never discussed. These physicians of the utmost fame also sent this letter containing their private opinion on paper with an NHS logo! It's not just me that thinks that this was inappropriate at best and highly expedient at worst. Just look at what the Department of Health thought about it here. But of course the letter is famous/infamous and this rebuke from the Department of Health is invisible to most people. Perhaps these eminent doctors think the end justifies the means when it comes to clamping down on GPs who would like to refer patients to other doctors who use homeopathy.

That Colquhoun, Ernst and co. are using the nanny state to further their cause is understandable from their point of view but to see young students inadvertently voting for 'tighter controls', a more regulated society and more of the nanny state, was rather sad. My view is that the whole campaign to stop the provision of homeopathy on the NHS (and remember YOU CANNOT GET NHS HOMEOPATHY WITHOUT YOUR GP REFERRING YOU)by attempting to restrict the referring rights of GPs in this way is a condescending and patronising slap in the face for Britain's 36 000 GPs.

But my friends, the tide is turning. In my next post I will cite many articles in which the Disciples of Scientism come under heavy attack for their 'philosophy' (Naive Realism in my opinion) and their attempts at achieving hegemony in medicine. Thank heavens for this. Natural, whole person orientated medicine (to complement conventional, more mechanistic medicine) will never die. Fresh ways of presenting it will appear in response to the Naive Realism of The Disciples of Scientism and you will see some of them in my next post.

As Hopkins put it:
'And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things'